Is there a price at which you will sell your values?
I was made an amazing offer to not put in a tender bid for a million dollar deal.
Have you ever had someone offer you a bribe to do something that was illegal, or unethical? Have you been pushed to wonder if there is a price point at which you might accept the bribe? I was offered a very large bribe and while I didn’t accept it, I did lose sleep over it.
I have been headhunted for most of my roles and I’d like to think that as well as being very successful in sales and as a leader, my ethics and values are part of the package. Certainly, my parents had a lot to do with my beliefs, and I suspect WWII had a lot to do with theirs.
Living in an occupied country, losing everything, and suffering through the Hunger Winter in the Netherlands in 1944, scavenging and begging for food, they had to rely on the kindness of strangers for their very survival. This can bring out the best or the worst in people. I believe in my family that it was the former.
I was headhunted to the role of Sales & Marketing Manager for Datachecker New Zealand. DataChecker was a subsidiary of National Advanced Systems, in turn, a subsidiary of National SemiConductor, a Santa Clara competitor of IBM in the mainframe and storage market.
As you may have gathered from other posts here, I am a learnaholic (I made that word up). My brain needs constant feeding. By that time, I had a Diploma in Hotel and Motel Management (that’s another story) and in my first year at Datachecker, I completed the National Retail and the Advanced National Retail Certificates and some grocery-specific courses. We also had great internal training online and at conferences in Australia.
Even though I would never become a retailer, (I wouldn’t have the patience for it), I needed to have a strong understanding of the business. I would in the coming years be a speaker at NARGON conferences and a regular contributor of editorial to magazines including Supermarket News and Grocery NZ.
My average sales in the mid-1980s were between $100,000 for a smaller New World or SuperValue supermarket, to $250,000 for a Pak N Save PoS scanning system. The commissions were good too. I was making good money. Intro, Pink Floyd.
We were doing very well in the owner-operated supermarket sector. The way I saw it, my role was to help already wealthy people make even more. My education was a great start because I understood very important information about the business. Aspects such as stock turn, the psychology of shelf placement, loss leaders, and exception reporting.
We were also doing very well in hospitality with specialised hospitality PoS solutions from the front desk to the restaurants and bars. We were the global supplier for KFC and we had new terminals and solutions complete with back-office inventory management.
What’s this got to do with bribery and values? I’m glad you asked.
A major New Zealand pharmacy chain had a tender out for a PoS solution for a few hundred retail stores.
I had started work on my bid and I thought we had a pretty good chance of winning the deal. We had the technology, and I could bring people over from the USA and Australia to do a national role out, which would give the client confidence.
One day, I was sitting in my office on the 5th floor of the HSBC bank building, looking down on Myers Park, when the phone rang. “Jack Daniel on the line for you,” our receptionist said. I have changed the name for obvious reasons.
I had no idea who he was, but I was about to find out. Jack was calling to offer me a deal. A job. I told him that I was very happy where I was (I was loving it) and not really interested. Jack insisted, “Let me take you out to lunch, what have you got to lose?”
I took him up on his lunch offer.
Over lunch, I discovered that he was an entrepreneur and reasonably new to the retail solutions industry. He wanted to offer me the job of Sales Manager. I said I already had a great job with a great future.
He then asked me if I was bidding for the national pharmacy chain deal. Jack was putting in a bid and thought he had a good chance. He thought I was going to be the other frontrunner.
He was right. I had already had discussions with the incumbent provider of pharmacy information management software provider and confirmed that our system could talk to theirs.
Jack offered me several drinks to match his, but I had one beer and a coffee. I wanted to keep my head clear. After lunch, he took me back to his showroom to see their product range and sat me down on the leather couch in his office.
“I’m going to make you an offer,” he said. “And I want you to think very carefully before you give me your decision. Hear me out.”
To cut the story short, what he wanted me to do was not put in a tender for the deal. To provide camouflage, I would be offered a legal contract for the job of Sales Manager at his company for a fixed term of 12 months. The Agreement had already been drawn up, he told me.
During those 12 months, I would not have to turn up or work at all, and it would be a way of covering my tracks with Datachecker. I would have to stay long enough to make sure we missed the deadline for the tender response.
I told him there was no way that I would violate my values and ethics to take a bribe like that. He responded that it wasn’t a bribe, it was a job offer, fully documented with a job contract put together by his lawyer.
“How much money would that be worth to you, Luigi?” he said. “I’m prepared to offer you a quarter of a million dollars!”
At this point, my adrenalin was starting to flow. $250,000! Remember this was in the 1980s.
To put it in perspective, my wife and I had recently purchased our first home. It was a full quarter of an acre in Ranui, a low decile suburb of West Auckland. It was the only area where we could afford to buy. It cost $67,000 and we were paying 18% interest on our mortgage. That property today, even in that area would be worth in the region of $800,000.
So $250,000 was a huge amount of money back then.
I said no about 3 times and his response was, “I’ll keep this offer open for 24 hours. You can discuss it with your wife, but otherwise don’t tell a soul, or things could become unpleasant. Sleep on it, and come back to me tomorrow.”
Well, I can tell you there was no sleeping going on in my house that night. I was determined to say no, but I had to think about what that sort of money could do for me and my family.
In the morning, I was very tired, but I hadn’t changed my mind. It did make me wonder. What if the offer had been half a million dollars, or a million? The question for me was whether there was a price point at which I would sacrifice my values and commit fraud. I hope not.
I think if I was that type of person, I would have taken the money, bought a nice new house in a better area, freehold, travelled to Europe to see my family, and bought a couple of new cars.
But the best things in life are free.
I was amazed that he felt it was worth offering me that much money. The whole sale was only worth about a million dollars plus installation and training. He must have had great margins.
Anyway, I went to my Country Manager in the corner office the next morning, having already rung Jack Daniel back and politely turned down his offer, letting him know there was no value in continuing the discussion, although he continued to try to persuade me.
My CEO told me to leave it with him, that I had done the right thing. Interestingly, not a word was said about this again, other than me sharing the experience with my colleagues. He did say that he would report it up the ladder. Five years later I learned to my detriment that my CEO was in fact a shyster, who would cost me tens of thousands of dollars, but you will have to subscribe to read that story in a future post. I did wonder a little as I had given him Jack’s name and that of his company.
I put my bid in for the business, which was over a million dollars and in the end, they decided to take a totally different route and not use PoS terminals at all, so neither company got the business.
Have you ever been offered a bribe? Did you take it? Were you tempted? I’d love to read your comments.
Ooh, that was a roller coaster of a ride. But Jack Daniel said he’d make it unpleasant for you should you talk about it, and I gather you discussed it with a few colleagues? Was there any retribution?